Build Nonprofit Capacity & Inspire Employees to Take Action
Volunteerism
Create meaningful and measurable impact through corporate volunteerism.
Benefits
Employee volunteer programs are a vital part of your corporate social responsibility efforts. If done well, your program can play an important role in building nonprofit capacity, engaging employees, meeting your company’s social impact goals, and meeting the pressing community needs.
Engage Employees in Giving
The importance of workplace volunteering is accelerating - our own research has shown it is the second most important component of employee engagement programs, and the #1 motivation for workplace donors (even ahead of matching gifts!)
Recruit and Retain Top Talent
As more companies have prioritized corporate volunteering and brought this spirit of innovation to their employee giving programs, they have seen the results: improvements in recruiting and retention, employee satisfaction, leadership and skill development, brand value, innovation, community relationships, employee health, and more.
Improve Employees’ Leadership and Professional Skill Sets
92% of surveyed corporate human resources executives agree that contributing business skills and expertise to a nonprofit can be an effective way to improve employees’ leadership and broader professional skill sets.
Why Partner With America's Charities?
America’s Charities Engage CSR Solution provides the flexible infrastructure your team needs to manage your team’s unique volunteering initiatives, monitor activity, and report on results. We provide everything necessary to help companies expand an established program or build a new program from scratch. While providing the right technology is an important piece of what we offer, it’s our team’s knowledge and service-focus that really brings your program to life. From getting to know all the distinct facets of your volunteer program during onboarding to helping you add-on and launch new programs long after your program has been up-and-running, our team meets regularly with each client to share proven practices, ideas, and configuration options for making your volunteer program run the way you need it to.
Access to Detailed Data
Learn about the issues and nonprofits that matter most to employees, track the time they spend volunteering, and report on the myriad volunteering initiatives and metrics that matter to your company’s business and social responsibility goals. We start you off with baseline reports and dashboards and build custom reports based on your specific business needs.
Make Volunteering Rewarding and Align Employee Actions with Your Giving Goals
Recognize employees’ efforts by rewarding their participation and time with Dollars for Doers volunteer grants or other incentives that support your nonprofit partners and the causes your employees are passionate about.
Build Employee Connection and Company Culture Through Individual or Team-based Volunteering
Employees can volunteer on their own – in person or virtually – or they can join colleagues through company-wide or department/region-focused opportunities. Build on event success by sharing employee experiences and event photos with others through the platform to encourage more participation.
Put the Power of Event Creation and Management in the Hands of Employees, Your Engagement Team, Partners, or Hybrid Approach
Using roles and workflow-based automation, you choose how your volunteer program is configured down to the details of event creation, promotion, registration management, and post-event reporting.
Add Some Gamification and Fun
Have some competitive employees? Harness some healthy competition between departments, business units, regional offices, or markets with a leaderboard or encourage self-competition with badges that track important milestones.
Solutions And Partnership Highlights
Event Creation and Management
We’ve seen clients manage event creation and event approval in a variety of ways – all of which can be configured using rules, workflows, and roles. You can empower employees to submit events, grant access to a third party volunteer event organizer (like GiveLively), invite nonprofit partners to submit opportunities, or restrict event creation to a select group of System Administrators and/or volunteer coordinators – you decide. We start with our existing baseline event form and configure it with your unique custom fields, questions, naming conventions, and policies, to streamline and automate everything from the event-building process, time tracking and sign-ups, to email confirmations and reminders with calendar attachments. Whether you’re offering company-wide or invitation-only events, location specific or virtual events, or events focused on specific skills or categories defined by your business, the platform automation saves your team time, while the specifications and customizations give you the control you need.
Incorporating Individual and Team-based Volunteering with Other Giving Programs
We get it, not all volunteering happens through events promoted directly on your volunteer portal. Regardless of the ‘why’ or ‘where’ volunteer activity took place, our personal/independent volunteering form allows your team to collect information about employees’ personal volunteer activity that takes place outside the platform, while empowering employees to still have their volunteer time count towards your company’s collective impact. Or, if someone participates in a team event but didn’t register for the event through the platform, we arm your team with the tools necessary to import offline registrations and participant information so it can be managed and reported with the associated event on your platform. Furthermore, whether volunteerism takes place independently or as a result of a teams-based company event – you can reward employees and amplify their impact by connecting volunteer hours with eligibility for corporate matches, grants, and other incentives.
Vetted Charity Listings
For your volunteer events, you can use the same charity list that you use with your workplace giving or grant making programs, or you can specify a separate list based on your volunteer program criteria and policies. While some of our clients use the same charity list across the board, others prefer to limit the charity listing for their workplace giving programs while offering broader charity choice for volunteering – or vice versa. We will configure the platform according to your criteria. Regardless of which direction you go, America’s Charities offers comprehensive charity listings and screening options. For validation, products such as the IRS database, GuideStar Charity Check, OFAC, and Lexis Nexis are used for tax or external verifications in order to provide auditable evidence of charity due diligence. If required, Engage can also integrate with various international tax authorities to verify charitable status: Internal Revenue Service (IRS), Canadian Revenue Agency (CRA), Australian Business Register, and The Charity Commission (GOV.UK) and others. You may approve which charities are eligible and ineligible for listing in the system, and we can accommodate charity write-in requests from your employees as well.
Collective and Personal Impact Dashboards and Reports
Each individual will have access to a page where they can view their individual volunteer impact and activity, making it easy to track volunteer hours, manage events and registrations, and submit stories to encourage others to volunteer. Additionally, you can display key stats about your organization’s collective volunteer impact for all to see through visualizations and charts, while also accessing an Administrator Dashboard and reports to keep tabs on key performance indicators and progress towards your organization’s broader CSR and employee engagement goals.
Training and Ongoing Support
In addition to receiving access to self-directed tools and resources for employee engagement best practices, your administrative team will receive custom user guides and training via webinar on all associated technology features, reporting functionality, and general volunteer capabilities to set your team up for success so you can get the most impact out of your volunteer program. After your program is up-and-running, we schedule subsequent check-in meetings to obtain feedback and to provide ongoing support to your team.
